


our day is our loss

by harborshore



Series: tomorrow, perhaps the future [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Movie Spoilers, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 14:02:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5629120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harborshore/pseuds/harborshore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luke comes home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our day is our loss

**Author's Note:**

> Leia Organa, you guys. The title of this ficlet and the title for the series come from Auden's "Spain".

Luke comes home.

Leia feels him long before the Falcon lands. Even if Rey not radioed in to let them know she was bringing Luke, she still would have felt her brother coming home. It’s a thrum deep in the Force, a ringing bell. When he left, it felt like he took the storms out of the sky; now, it feels like the Rebel base is the center of a tornado, that preternatural calm that nothing can touch.

Good. He’s gotten himself together, then. 

She doesn’t let herself think that he ought to have done it sooner. A loss is a loss is another thing to carry. Leia stopped assigning blame to people a long time ago. She trades in hope, in resistance despite impossible odds. There’s no room for blame in that. You always have to keep going.

She meets the ship, every inch the General everyone needs to see. Head high, calm face. It’s not difficult.

Luke walks to her, and there’s a hug that ought to be felt across the galaxy. It nearly breaks her, but the cheers around them make her remember who she is, where they are.

“Leia,” he murmurs.

“Brother,” she says, and he doesn’t flinch, though he winces a little when she says “I missed you.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and there’s an ocean’s depth of regret in that, an Alderaan exploding across the sky. Han, falling. She blinks it away, touches his shoulder.

“You’re here,” she says. “I’m glad Rey found you.”

\--

She watches him teach Rey how to use the lightsaber knowingly, more than instinct wrought from hard-won experience with other kinds of fighting influencing her moves at last, though Rey hardly seems to need it. Thinking of her son in the forest.

Rey told her about it haltingly, carefully when Leia asked.

Rey will beat him, next time. The way she opens to Luke’s teaching would be frightening, if not for the way she smiles at Poe and Finn, the way she plays with BB-8 and her hand with, her love of machinery.

Oh, Leia can see why Han loved her instantly. They would have taken over the galaxy together. She can see his delight in her know-how, her sharpness. 

\--

Luke comes to her when he’s done for the day, sits next to her as they eat, absently folding a napkin into a flower with his mind alone.

She glances at him, at the flower, then floats a pen over, cracking it open to spill the ink. The flower turns blue in blotches, rivers of ink creeping along the soft paper.

“You still know how,” Luke says softly.

“You knew that,” she says.

“I knew that,” he agrees, and the flower expands, blooming impossibly, the paper stretching in ways it shouldn’t be able to.


End file.
